


far off in sunlit places

by triplesalto



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Extra Treat, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-26 22:45:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12567872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triplesalto/pseuds/triplesalto
Summary: After a difficult day, Twelve visits Missy in the Vault.





	far off in sunlit places

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ruuger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruuger/gifts).



Sometimes even a Time Lord had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Or perhaps even more often than ordinary people, given that the Doctor could recall off the top of his head at least eighteen days in his current regeneration alone that could have destroyed the universe, his own existence, or both. 

Today hadn’t been that cataclysmic, but he had spent the last twenty hours running about trying to keep the three civilisations on Mahzizoloub Delta from blowing each other to smithereens, all while nursing a blister on his heel and trying to ignore an incipient headache. It was an insistent headache, the kind that announces itself hours in advance to give the sufferer due warning that they are about to be incapacitated for the foreseeable future. The Doctor, not having the luxury of retiring to a fainting couch, had grimly soldiered on. Bill had noticed something was wrong, but she was new and couldn’t entirely read him yet; Amy or Donna would have rumbled him hours ago. “It’s a _Time Machine_ ,” he could almost hear Donna saying with potent exasperation, the capitals audible. “Take us somewhere else, have a lie-down, and get back to it when you’re yourself again. Men. Never take care of themselves properly.”

Without someone to demand he rest, the Doctor had simply pushed on, and now he was paying for it. At least Mahzizoloub Delta had been saved, and now he had only one final task before he could surrender to the headache’s throbbing embrace. Nardole had offered to check on the Vault for him, but the Doctor always liked to inspect it himself after he’d been off world. He’d seen the damage Missy could do countless times before, and knew better than anyone else how brilliant she was. If anyone could escape a quantum fold chamber and wreak havoc across the universe, it would be Missy.

When he stepped inside the Vault, Missy swivelled at the piano. “A visitor, how droll –” She cut herself off, frowning. “What the hell happened to you, dear?”

The Doctor shrugged. Even that small movement jolted his head. “Nothing.” Missy was safely secured. He could leave.

Her frown turned into a sly smile. “Did you run into little old me out there? Looks like I was quite cruel. Tsk tsk.”

“It’s just a headache,” the Doctor said – and then everything faded.

❧

When the Doctor came to again, he was lying upside down across one of Missy’s sofas, his ankles resting on the sofa’s back and his head cushioned by a pillow on the floor. Missy was sitting next to him, her hand on his hipbone holding him steady.

“Uh,” he managed.

“You fainted,” Missy told him. There was more than a little gleefulness in her announcement.

“Why am I upside down?” He would have tried to sit up, but she’d put him in such a position that he was going to have be very careful, or risk an embarrassing collapse in a pretzel of limbs. 

“Don’t move,” she said, suddenly bossy. “Wherever you’ve been today, somebody poisoned you. I smelled it on you as soon as you walked in the door. Nasty stuff. Your head must have been pounding.”

“Er,” the Doctor said. “Yes?”

She nodded. It looked odd from the Doctor’s vantage point, staring up at the underside of her chin. “Don’t tell me. You were trying to ruin a perfectly good war, or interplanetary mayhem, or some evil genius’s cunning plan. Well, somebody thought they’d take you out first.”

That scientist he’d met this morning _had_ seemed quite put out. “Poison? Really?”

“Luckily they didn’t get the dose calibration right,” Missy said, with professional disdain. “Time Lords take a lot of killing. Now if they’d given it to your pet instead, she’d be dead as a doornail.” That was said with far too much relish. “Which planet were you on?”

The Doctor thought about this for a moment, but could think of no reason not to tell her. Unless a future regeneration used the knowledge to masquerade as a scientist and poison him, but even Missy, whatever her faults, generally respected the time stream too much to wilfully risk paradox. (Usually.) “Mahzizoloub Delta.”

“Oh, that’s an easy one,” Missy said. The Doctor wasn’t surprised. The Master had always had an encyclopaedic memory for poisons, weapons, and all manner of destructive forces. “I’ll tell you the antidote if you pay up.”

The TARDIS probably knew the antidote, if he extricated himself from Missy and the sofa and stumbled back to it. Probably. Not certainly – he’d never been to Mahzizoloub Delta before – and if he turned down Missy’s offer, she might refuse to tell him if he returned hat in hand. If her mood changed, she might as easily prefer to watch him suffer, rather than cut a deal. 

“Terms?” he asked, wearily. Even without the poisoning, it had been a long day.

Last time she’d extorted him, she’d demanded a particle accelerator, a 3-D printer, and a pony. This time she took a minute to think about it. 

The Doctor concentrated on not fainting again. Being upside down might be helping his body fight off the poison (though of course it was always possible that Missy had just put him upside down for the fun of it), but it wasn’t the most comfortable position. This regeneration wasn’t as bendy as some of his earlier ones.

“The collected works of Xenos the Great,” Missy announced. “I don’t care if they’re thirtieth century. I promise not to take them with me and blow your Earthlings’ minds when I make my inevitable escape.”

The Doctor had never liked Xenos. But he could put up with Missy thundering intolerable not-music on the piano, and if he pretended he didn’t mind it, she’d eventually give up and move on to other ways of needling him. “Fine.”

“The bald one has to address me as Missy The Great and Powerful for the next fortnight.”

“I’m not making terms for Nardole,” the Doctor said, suppressing a smile at the thought of Nardole’s face at that particular request. “You’ll have to do _him_ a favour for that.”

“Is that what I’m doing?” Missy asked. Her face was inscrutable. “Doing you a favour?”

He didn’t answer.

After a minute she moved on. “I want a pet.”

“No,” the Doctor said, immediately. “Don’t call them that. And you’re not getting one.” He remembered how easily Missy had killed Osgood, how little she regarded human life. They might have a never-ending philosophical disagreement about the value and sanctity of human life, but he was certainly not asking a human to be the guinea pig stepping into the spider’s lair. (Er. Maybe his head was more scrambled than he thought.)

Missy was looking at him scornfully. “Not a _human_ pet,” she said. “You can keep those. Boring. No, I want a cat.”

“A cat,” the Doctor repeated, unsure if he’d heard correctly.

“Not a nice one,” Missy said. “Not one of the ones that sleep all day. An interesting one.”

The Doctor had visions of himself wandering from animal shelter to animal shelter, asking for grumpy, odd cats. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing he’d ever done. 

And it must be difficult for Missy in here, month after month, year after year. He tried to spend time with her, but eventually even he would grow short on variety. He could see why she might want another living thing to be her companion, to while away the long hours. Yet – this was Missy. No matter her current mood, he might find her a cat and arrive a week later to find it dead, just like her many human victims.

“I can’t bring you a living being,” he said, trying to purge his voice of pity. Missy was capable of becoming quite murderous if she detected pity. 

“Right,” Missy said. “I forgot. I’m not a safe person.” 

He couldn’t tell whether she was saying it with pride or not. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologise,” Missy said. “If you don’t trust me to change, you’re a fool to waste your time in here. Leave and throw away the key.”

She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking towards the windows, at the fake sunlight the quantum fold chamber gave her, streaming in to her sterile prison.

No doubt she was trying to manipulate him. The Master had always been a master of manipulation. Yet the Doctor found that, as always, something inside him reached out for the smallest tendril of hope. There had been hurt in her eyes, before she looked away. Perhaps she truly did want to change. Perhaps all these years in the Vault weren’t entirely pointless. Perhaps there was a future beyond the Vault, somewhere in the distant sunlit uplands.

“I’ll bring you a plant,” he said.

Missy’s gaze came back to him. “A plant?” she asked. “A plant?” Then she was laughing, a sudden burst of sound. There was no cruelty to it, however, and only the slightest tinge of mockery. “Why thank you, Thete, I will treasure it forever.”

“After I bring you back from Scotland.”

Her intake of breath was so slight, he almost didn’t hear it. “Scotland?” she said, casually. “What’s in Scotland?”

“The Ninth Legion,” he said. “We’re investigating its disappearance.” 

“Hope that wasn’t one of mine. That would be _awkward_ ,” she said, stage-whispering.

“I can’t let you out of the TARDIS. Not yet. But if you want to come along…” 

Missy’s face took on startled incredulity. “Who would want to leave this lovely prison?” 

“There’s some maintenance you could do, if you were bored,” the Doctor added. He knew how much Missy enjoyed technology. Granted, most of the time she was doing things like hacking Immortality Gates, using dimensional engineering to hide Cybermen in the middle of London, and creating a vast Nethersphere on a matrix data slice. Still, if he put the proper safeguards and subroutines in place on the TARDIS, Missy wouldn’t be able to do any damage, even if she did get mischievous, murderous, or both.

“It’s not enough to keep me prisoner,” Missy said, examining her nails. “Now you have me doing free labour as well?”

The Doctor could feel her excitement. He felt slightly remorseful. Perhaps he should have done this sooner. But would he have had the confidence to take the risk, if Missy hadn’t come with Nardole to rescue them from Mars? And had not only come to their rescue, but hadn’t tried to escape? Nardole wouldn’t have been able to stop her, if Missy had been determined.

“Well,” Missy said, standing up from the sofa. “I suppose I can fit you in.”

The movement of the sofa disrupted the Doctor’s fragile balance, and he slipped into a heap on the floor. His head was still pounding, but he felt less tired than he had been.

“By the way,” Missy said over her shoulder, “You need to drink about eight litres of orange juice, and fifty grams of chocolate. Then do some vigorous calisthenics. You’ll be fine.”

The Doctor had heard of worse antidotes. He brightened. His head might actually stop throbbing soon. This day was certainly looking up.

Missy settled down at the piano and began playing something loud and jazzy, and the Doctor took that as his cue to leave. “I’ll be back in the morning,” he said at the door. 

“Bring breakfast,” Missy demanded, her fingers still flying over the keys. “Eggs, bacon, sausage, tattie scones. I need sustenance before I try to make sense of that antique TARDIS of yours.”

She might sound imperious and uninterested, but there was a suppressed current of anticipation under her cool exterior. Even her music echoed it, flitting about with incoherent atonal harmonies, its rhythms as unpredictable as Missy herself.

The Doctor smiled, though he stopped immediately when it made his head double the number of mastodons thudding around his aching skull. 

“Your wish is my command,” he said, and let himself out of the Vault.

❧

**Author's Note:**

> At the end of _The Empress of Mars_ , Nardole enlists Missy to help him rescue the Doctor and Bill. Upon being rescued, the Doctor says this "can't happen" and tells her she'll have to go back in the Vault. Yet sometime between then and _The Eaters of Light_ (when Bill and Nardole find out that Missy has been in the TARDIS while they've been running around chasing the Ninth Legion), the Doctor changes his mind. 
> 
> This is a story about why and how that change of mind might have happened.


End file.
